IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cwl/cwldpp/2489.html

Drivers of Racial Differences in C-Sections

Author

Listed:
  • Adriana Corredor-Waldron

    (North Carolina State)

  • Janet Currie

    (Yale and NBER)

  • Molly Schnell

    (Northwestern and NBER)

Abstract

Black mothers with a trial of labor are 25 percent more likely to deliver by C-section than non-Hispanic White mothers. The gap is largest among mothers with the lowest risk and is reduced by only one-fifth when controlling for observed medical risk factors, sociodemographic characteristics, hospital, and physician or medical practice group. Remarkably, the gap disappears when performing a C-section is more costly due to a concurrent pre-labor C-section limiting surgical resources. This finding is consistent with provider discretion rather than differences in unobserved medical risk accounting for persistent racial disparities in delivery method. The additional intrapartum C-sections that occur among low-risk women when hospitals are unconstrained negatively impact infant health.

Suggested Citation

  • Adriana Corredor-Waldron & Janet Currie & Molly Schnell, 2025. "Drivers of Racial Differences in C-Sections," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 2489, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University.
    • Handle: RePEc:cwl:cwldpp:2489
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cowles.yale.edu/sites/default/files/2026-01/d2489.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cwl:cwldpp:2489. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Brittany Ladd (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cowleus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.